Ex-UM student charged in dismemberments

TOMS RIVER, N.J. – A former nurse acquitted of manslaughter in Maine has been charged with the early 1990s dismemberment slayings of two men he recently had met in Manhattan.

Richard W. Rogers Jr., 51, was indicted by an Ocean County grand jury on two counts of murder and two counts of hindering apprehension, the county prosecutor announced Tuesday.

Authorities say he killed Thomas Mulcahy, 57, of Sudbury, Mass., dismembered his body, placed it in plastic garbage bags and dumped them along Route 72 in Woodland Township, Burlington County, and at a Garden State Parkway rest area in Stafford Township on July 10, 1992.

Mulcahy’s head, torso and arms were left in Woodland, while the rest of his body was dumped into trash cans at the Stafford Forge rest area, where they were found by New Jersey Highway Authority workers emptying the trash cans.

Rogers also is charged with killing Anthony E. Marrero, 44, of New York, whose dismembered body was found May 10, 1993, on a dirt road in the Whiting section of Manchester Township.

Ocean County Prosecutor Thomas F. Kelaher said both victims were stabbed repeatedly. Mulcahy died from three stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, while Marrero was stabbed six times in the back.

Because of similarities in the deaths, as well as several other unsolved cases involving mutilated bodies found near highways in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, a multiagency task force was created to investigate. Kelaher could not say whether Rogers is a suspect in any other deaths.

Fingerprints lifted from the plastic bags containing the victims’ remains were matched against a nationwide fingerprint database of criminal suspects, but no matches were found initially, Kelaher said.

Authorities resubmitted the prints to the nationwide Automated Fingerprint Identification System in April 2001. The next month, Maine State Police advised the task force that the fingerprints submitted from the dismemberment case matched those of Rogers, who had been arrested previously in Maine.

Rogers was 22 and a graduate student studying French at the University of Maine in 1973 when he became a suspect in the death of a Frederic A. Spencer, who lived in his apartment building in Orono.

Spencer’s body was found a few days after his death by two bicyclists riding along a deserted road near Old Town.

After his arrest, Rogers told police he caught Spencer in his apartment and that Spencer came at him with a hammer. He said he managed to get the hammer away and beat Spencer until he died.

Six months later, Rogers was acquitted of manslaughter in Penobscot County Superior Court.

Maine had not been a member of the automated system when the prints were first submitted, Kelaher said.

“The fingerprints tied both victims together, and to Mr. Rogers,” Kelaher said.

Two weeks later, Rogers was arrested by New York City police and taken to the Ocean County Jail, where he has been held ever since.

The prosecutor said Rogers had just met both victims shortly before they were killed, declining to speculate on the nature of their relationship. Mulcahy last was seen alive on July 8, 1992, at the Market Street Bar near the former site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Marrero last was seen on May 4, 1993, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan.

Kelaher said the nearly two-year delay between Rogers’ arrest and indictment was not unusual because investigators from various agencies had to compare evidence and run numerous tests.

“They had to get search warrants for his apartment and his locker at work,” Kelaher said, declining to say whether any useful evidence was recovered from either location.

Kelaher said it is not immediately clear whether Rogers was familiar with Ocean County, or whether he purposely selected it to dump the bodies. But he said killers occasionally have used the county to dispose of bodies because it has many rural, sparsely populated areas where such activity is not likely to be witnessed.

At the time of his arrest, Rogers was living in Staten Island, N.Y., and had been employed as a registered nurse at Mount Sinai Medical Center for more than 20 years.

He is being held on $1 million bail. No arraignment date has yet been set.